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I’ve been using twitter for some time now, as I hope to make it the default social media for promoting my blog. Thanks for platforms like bufferapp and bit.ly, I can track how often people visit my website from twitter. The result aren’t good, in fact I’d be lucky if a tweet was able to garner 2 hits to my website, most of the time it hovers around an agonizing ZERO!!

So what am I doing wrong?

The answer is a profound “I don’t know“. However, I’m determined to stick to my strategy of using twitter (as opposed to Facebook, linkedIN or G+) not because I’ve already sunk so much effort into it, but because all said and done, I still believe that twitter is the platform of choice for ‘promoting’ content, which is distinctly different from ‘sharing’ content.

Now while I don’t know all the things I’m doing wrong, here are 3 things that I doing to improve my visibility on twitter and drive those hits to my blog.

1) Using the damn #hashtags

Personally I didn’t know about #hashtags and thought of them as similar to the tag concept in wordpress, which is used to group items in logical categories.A #hashtag in twitter isn’t the same, and if you’re wondering what a #hashtag is, here’s the answer courtesy of the amazing blog Tech for Luddites

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.

The good thing about the hash tag is that if someone wrote a tweet without putting the word LOST in the main message, it will still show up in your search because of the tag. Eg. “Who is hotter? Jack, Sawyer, or Desmond? #lost”

The flip side is that if you search using the tag, and someone wrote a tweet about the show without including it, that tweet won’t show up in your results, even if LOST appears in the text. Eg. “Do you think LOST has jumped the shark?”

Now that is one of the best explanations of #hashtags I could find. The crux though is that if you’re hoping to reach outside your circle of followers in twitter you’re going to need #hashtags. Waiting for that small number of followers to retweet your tweets probably isn’t going to work. A #hashtag puts your tweet up there ready to be searched, so #hashtag every post at least once to promote to a wider audience.

2) Get more followers

This is straight forward. If I’ve got no followers, of just 100 , or just 1000 then my visibility is going to remain stagnant. If I want instead of push forward and get more content and visibility then I’m going to need to up my game and get more followers.

From my general observations, the easiest way to get more followers is to FOLLOW others. However, this comes with a caveat where you get massive amount of tweet bots automatically following you just because you followed someone else. Beware the tweet bots, they’re not interested in you, to them you’re just another statistic…literally. Plus a tweet bot isn’t worth you time, they never reply to tweets and never visit your site, they’re just interested in racking up followers. Allow them to follow you, but never follow them (unless you want to be spammed till kingdom come)

The second way to get more followers is constant tweeting, here’s where bufferapp (one of my favorite apps) comes in handy. A 20 minute scroll through google reader and I can rack up 5 tweets on buffer ready to roll throughout the day.

Of course you realize that I only have 100 followers, so my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt. B

3) Get into conversation

If someone tweeting something interesting, reply to them, tell them what you think. Getting into conversation is the whole point of twitter it’s part of it’s charm. People fail to realize that.

Part of the conversation can start with you, thank someone whose followed you with a link to your site. It may work, it may not, but you never know till you try.